There is a Facebook group and a small page on the website.
DavidNash
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It’s not that I don’t want people to upskill, it’s that I think it’s best done by people who have experience in that area, whether that is via a course or workshop.
In terms of getting people to meet in person, I agree that certain talks/workshops/themes can help attract different people, but the best outcomes from that aren’t usually what people learn, but the connections they make, and designing a workshop just to drive attendance may not be the most efficient way of getting people to attend.
Latest EA Updates for August 2019
I agree with everything you said, I guess those three points aren’t things that I think about often but might make sense to update the document to better reflect that.
Effective Altruism London Strategy 2019
I may have missed this but does the $10 billion spent on peace building programs in 2016 include spending by governments, or is that just foundations?
I’m not sure that’s roughly true, EA priorities also have to be neglected, generally the most effective interventions are already taken by governments and large organisations.
I don’t think that this article is a good representation of the debate over these issues and takes an approach where the author seems to have already made up their mind about possible solutions.
This post from Our World in Data probably gives the best overview of stagnation in global poverty
“A generation ago the majority of the world’s poorest lived in economies that went on to grow very fast. What is different now is that a rising share of the world’s poorest are living in economies which have not achieved economic growth in the recent past.
Half a billion are expected to remain in extreme poverty by 2030 if current trends of economic growth and levels of within-country inequality persist.
The decline of extreme poverty is expected to slow down.Much of the progress will be driven by economic growth in Asia, and India in particular. The number of people in extreme poverty in Africa is expected to stagnate.”
I think this article in Vox covers some of the main points.
″...improving the American education system, while important, is neither a neglected cause nor a tractable one. It is a system on which hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually by diffuse governments whose policies are difficult and expensive to change, where matters of importance are intensely contested, and where interest groups tend to fight each other to a standstill.
And it’s a system where, even after investing millions if not billions in research, we still don’t have a lot of confidence as to which interventions are helpful and which are not. The views of key actors, notably the Gates Foundation, have tended to shift rapidly on those substantive questions.
If every issue in the world were as crowded and hard to make progress on as education in the US, then I’d understand why foundations like Gates and Broad keep chugging. But that’s not the case...”
I think tags might be helpful, but would probably be used by very few people and still miss out the most important reasons for having a different structure.
Another thing to think about is that the forum as it currently is might be favoured by people who use it, but may miss out on the counterfactual people who would use an actual forum if it existed or bounce upon impact with this forum.
Functionally it would be similar, but from a user point of view it would probably be quite a different experience.
From my own usage I have rarely used tags on blogs or news feeds but have often interacted with different sub-forums.
The EA Forum is a News Feed
Latest EA Updates for July 2019
I guess I have concerns with over valuing metrics that are easier to collect which might lead to optimising for the wrong activities.
There is the impact report from EA London for 2018.
Why not just use Glassdoor?
Thanks for writing this up, I think it’s really useful to collate these resources together. Although I think some of the sources are a bit out of date and some recent write ups indicate the opposite advice in some situations—one example being outreach techniques.
Facebook advertisement, direct messages and meetup.com subscriptions are very effective
for outreach but are costly. Email lists and word of mouth are not effective.I would say that email lists and word of mouth have been the two most useful ways of building up a community in London, this could potentially be down to how it’s done, but we stopped doing FB adverts and meetup events as it would generally attract people who aren’t as interested in EA.
I also have this list of various community building resources I have found useful over the last few years that might have some things that could be added to the literature review.
I wrote a similar post about this a few months ago, a few days before GiveWell announced they were looking into a wider range of interventions.
The EA fund for global development seems to be the easiest way to get funding towards this area. I suspect that most donors involved in EA would be happy to fund interventions with less hard evidence if given the choice.
One reason why there may be a lack of conversation in this area is that there are many organisations and 10,000+ experts in international development and ways to engage that don’t involve EA. Whereas in factory farming and emerging technology risks there are fewer places for people to go to discuss these causes and so discussion happens in EA spaces (until causes get big enough to create their own networks).
There is a paper from the Centre for Global Development that might be relevant.
It is probably this career discussion one.
1. Most of my time will be spent doing similar things to last year, although I’ve only been working full time for 9 months. I think innovation, at least for me, happens over time rather than as a one off process, with ideas being formed and then being tested to see what people like. One recent example is the community spotlight, which was an idea a few weeks ago and now has become a regular post.
In terms of taking EA to the next level, there isn’t a plan to grow or hire more people but rather coordinate and support nascent organisations in London that can start doing other work and grow independently.
2. I will have a look